CIPR Sectoral Group of the Year 2010

It’s election time at CIPR, and Jenni Field, past chair and current committee secretary is standing for council.She took time out to find out how the presidential candidates view internal communication. Over to Jenni:

Last week I approached the three candidates standing as President Elect to find out a bit more about what they think of internal comms. All three replied instantly so here are the answers from Emma Leech, Gary Taylor and Sarah Hall:

1. What do you think the role of internal comms is inside organisations today?

Emma: Internal communications plays a critical role within organisations. We work in ever more competitive and rapidly changing environments and ensuring we attract and retain the best talent, unlock potential and ideas, and differentiate on excellent and authentic customer service are obvious wins. Less obvious is the tremendous impact that loyalty, engagement, great change management and advocacy can have across the organisation and – very pragmatically – on the bottom line.

I’m also a Fellow of the Institute of Internal Communications and as someone who has worked in the field and now manages…

We’ve been busy building a new website for CIPR Inside members and the wider internal communication professional community. www.ciprinside.co.uk. It’s exciting times for CIPR Inside as we have more events, more collaboration and engagement with professionals in our industry and grow in numbers.

We’ve added more functions and therefore you should be able to access and share even more useful information on the site. What will make it really successful are contributions and information from professionals like you.

We love to share your news and comment pieces with our members and the wider IC community. So if you’d like to be a contributor please do drop us a line on: ciprinside@gmail.com There are also places you can upload case studies and reports, access webinars, add yourself as a freelancer or find a freelancer, and much more.

We plan to add some more functions in the coming weeks and months as well. And if there’s something you think we should have on the site that isn’t there please tell us and we’ll try to work it into the site.

We will redirect this site to the new one very soon, and the new site will take its place for all our communications.

Back in June we held our Measurement Summit, with experts from the industry sharing their views, insights and practices on measuring internal communication. Together we started to create a set of measurement principles that could be adopted across the internal communication profession.

We are now ready to finalise the principles we developed together. And we need your help and input.

We’ve got a short questionnaire to make it quick and easy for you to tell us your views.

Think about how you show the value of your internal communication. What measures and methods do you use to demonstrate that your work has delivered the objectives and made a difference to your organisation?

The Measurement Summit presenters are reconvening in October and will look at the draft principles and the feedback from professionals like you before deciding on the final set of principles which will be announced at the CIPR Inside Conference on 7th November.

Richard Howat is an ex-editor in the dead trees press, he was recruited to help centralise corporate communications for the company’s 36000 people who work in hundreds of locations across Britain; experience which came in handy when he was then involved in decentralising and devolving communications some years later.

His only pretension to gurudom is that he has made most of the mistakes out there – and will openly admit to at least some.

Richard also really enjoys the challenges of pithy plain talking frontline comms – and in encouraging leaders to find the voice and skills to talk authentically with their people.

Richard Jordan, Director, Barclays Investment Bank

To connect with a globally dispersed workforce Richard Jordan uses everything from a fully personalised intranet through which he can deliver automatically segmented messaging, to global videoconference facilities. Richard will talk about the decisions he’s made in developing that infrastructure and the strategy that underpins those decisions, including where they didn’t work out and what he’s doing next. Richard will also talk about managing social media in one of the most regulated industries in the world.

So come along to The Well, at Clerkenwell, London from 6.30pm on Tuesday 18th September to meet all three of our Gurus and get some great insights into reaching your audiences, no matter where they are.

With ever changing workplaces and global teams, truly engaging your workforce when they are in different offices, different sites and different countries can be a real challenge. Add different languages and cultures to the mix and getting your message heard, understood and acted upon is a real achievement.

Our next Ask the Guru event on Tuesday 18th September 6.30pm til 8.30pm gives you the opportunity to hear from three internal communicators who face this challenge on a daily basis. Come along to discover creative ways to engage a remote workforce and ask specific questions about the challenges you face.

Our three gurus are all internal communication specialists who work in-house. Each has a unique experience engaging their remote workforce.

The first of our Gurus is Jane Edbrooke, Internal Communications Manager, at Nuffield Health who has worked in communications for seven years, first in public affairs and community engagement in local government and then in stakeholder management, transition and digital communications for NHS London. Jane specialises in the creation of internal and external digital channels, and is excited about the blurred lines between internal and external communications as social media grows. She sees staff as any organisation’s biggest asset in terms of brand and reputation.

Our other two Gurus for September’s event will take the limelight in our next article coming soon.

Max challenges conventional thinking, and advocates innovation. He believes failure is part of learning, and reaction as much as planning helps to make organisations successful. As a guru on strategy, author and advisor to some of the most admired companies in the world his message is clear; strategy is only effective when it shapes events in the real world.

As organisations continue to adapt to survive, the old plans won’t help; simply hoping for the best won’t work. Max will tell us as internal communicators how we can help employees embrace complexity and uncertainty.

He’ll also talk about how leaders can inspire people, showing that effort is worthwhile and that things can be better. Overcoming apathy and boredom and restoring purpose to people’s lives is in our grasp. And learn how internal communications can help to free an organisation’s radicals to challenge assumptions.

This conference will open your eyes to a new age of internal communication.

Back in the beginning of the summer a group of like minded people gathered at CIPR HQ to learn, share knowledge and discuss the pros and cons of the different methods of measuring internal communication.

The measurement summit was a brilliant event, and created great discussion on the day and beyond. But we’re not finished yet.

Now we need you. We challenge all internal communication professionals to give us their views, their experience, and their preferences when it comes to measuring internal communication and most importantly their take on the principles we have drafted.

The eight initial principles to emerge were:

· Set measurable internal communication objectives and make research and measurement part of everyday internal communication activity

· Outputs are not enough, outcomes and behaviour change should also be measured

· Build action planning into any measurement process from the start

· Collaborate with departments across the organisation to determine what needs to be measured

· Link measurement to employee engagement and corporate performance

· Establish real-time, regular reporting

· Use sentiment analysis to find out what is trending internally

· Go beyond basic data to find insights from deep analysis

We know these are not perfect. So, go on, be brave, speak up and give us your suggestions, comment on this blog post, and tell us on twitter, LinkedIn or facebook – we don’t mind what you say, we welcome objective criticism.

The experts who spoke at the measurement summit are re-convening in October to discuss the comments and finalise the principles for CIPR Inside before we announce them at our conference on 7th November 2012.

Exciting times are ahead, an industry standard we can all refer to and be proud to use – be a part of it.